This raises an interesting question: how should the UI behave in this scenario?
Only users with 10K reputation can even see most deleted questions, so asking them to just undelete posts they feel were wrongly closed (and disabling the ability to reopen until this is done) makes sense - except that if a moderator was involved in the deletion, 10K users can't vote to undelete.
Reopening and undeleting when a sufficient number of reopen votes are accumulated would allow the community to override moderators in cases when it makes sense to do so, but with a higher number of votes required. This has a few problems though:
- It fails to provide concerned 10K users with a way to make the question visible without also reopening: if cleanup was needed prior to reopening, this would require that it be done by 10K users.
- It reduces the number of votes that would otherwise be required from 8 to 5.
It's very unintuitive. A quick check shows only three deleted questions on Stack Overflow that were reopened by vote after being deleted:
- How to uninstall / completely remove Oracle 11g (client)?
- Extracting data from JSON and create a Pie chart
- Sending URL with queries using IP address
...only one of which was deleted by a moderator. A total of 130 deleted posts have had at least 1 reopen vote cast since their deletion, with 41 of those having only a single vote from the post's author. These are pretty small numbers considering the scale at which Stack Overflow operates.
In short, it probably makes more sense to disable the reopen vote in these cases and just direct the voter to either vote to undelete, flag, or raise the issue here on Meta. Given the frequency with which this happens, it's not a pressing issue in any case.
Background
Originally, moderator deletion votes were "binding" in the same way as moderator close votes: they immediately took effect, deleting the post. Other users could still vote to undelete, overriding the moderator just as ordinary users can reopen questions that a moderator has closed.
This became a problem because - unlike close/reopen - the post's author could always vote to undelete his own posts. Making moderator delete votes impossible to override was a rather heavy-handed solution to this problem, but it was effective and has no doubt side-stepped a lot of drama over the years.
Since then, a more specific fix for this problem has been implemented: author's votes are only binding when they were the only delete-voter (multiple undelete votes in these cases were also disabled a few months later). A loophole remains that allows one-vote undeletion by the author if he was the last delete voter however.